Malawi rank highly on countries with most suffering people

Malawi, christened the Warm Heart of Africa, is among three African countries and 16 world countries with the miserable people, with 27 out of every 100 of the country’s population claimed to be “suffering”, according to a latest study by an international research group, Gallup.

The results of the survey are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, per country.

The research group also clarifies respondents as ‘thriving’, ‘struggling’, or ‘suffering’ according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from zero to 10 based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, which is an example of wellbeing assessment widely used by researchers.

In Africa, Malawi comes third after Madagascar and Tanzania.

A ward in the Presbyterian Church-sponsored Ekwendeni Hospital in northern Malawi.

In 20 out of 143 countries and areas surveyed, at least a quarter of the adult population rated their lives poorly enough to be considered suffering.

“Those countries span most world regions, including six places in crisis-hit Europe. Worldwide, one in seven adults was suffering in 2012. South Asia led the world in suffering at 24 percent followed by 21 percent in the Balkans and the Middle East and North Africa,” reads the report in part.

The group considers people to be suffering if they rate their current lives and prospects for the next fives at four or lower respectively.

In August this year, the Centre for Social Concern (CSC) expressed concern over the extremely high levels of jobless prevailing in the country.